Archive for January, 2008

January 22nd, 2008 a top five list?

what, i am writing one for 2007? in no order at all…

kuchiroro - golden love

folk poppers turned rappers, sometimes soft rock atmospherics. can you tell from the airbrushed cover? it’s hard to tell where they want to go, rapping over 90s backing tracks, a programmed beat here, a keyboard line there. did they listen to digable planets and a tribe called quest as kids? where did they get their slightly american accented english from? it’s really when they take their midi to the next level in songs like planetarium that kuchiroro stop being a tribute to their favourite rappers and come into their own.

recommended tracks: golden king, manatsu no last tune, inner light

meg - beam

nakata yasutaka saves meg from indies label single hell, to bring her into his house of fashionable, er, house, which already includes colkinikha designer kate sakai (coltemonikha), perfume and his original project capsule. meg is already a designer herself (carolina glasser) and girls magazine favourite. and beam is everything that capsule could be, but can’t because nakata uses it as a platform for his current obsession with european house, producing a harder edged but mostly cliched sound (pick the samples). because meg can afford to be so pop, nakata need not restrain himself. capsule couldn’t be caught singing a piano ballad, nor could nakata ever get away with two oversized dancing cats behind him…

recommended tracks: in your eyes, OK, model

polysics - karate house

the later albums of polysics consists of hayashi increasingly actually writing songs, instead of playing whatever spastic chords and then making nonsense mumbo jumbo to go with it. thus he has hauled members kayo, fumi and yano into a tight pop outfit. i can barely fault this album - it has the right balance of crazy, and yet still be fun enough to sing along to. also i am getting too sleepy to write any further at one thirty in the morning. tois!

recommended songs: everything, no i mean - new wave denwa soudan shitsu, shizuka is a machine doctor, you-you-you

kaji hideki - towns and streets

glancing at his official hp, kaji sure keeps ups with the current 7″ singles. last year he turned forty, but you’d never know he’d seen both the emergence and the revival of new wave. kaji’s sound blends british beat, swedish pop and somehow never sounds jaded even though he’s been releasing albums since 1996. well, except for last year’s new pretty, where he tried to combine musical trends with his now classic shibuya-kei sound and it ended up sounding rather flat. towns and streets gets the balance right, holding back on the heavy handed synths while maintaining the xtc influences.

recomended songs: you are the only one, banana boy peach girl, top

asai kenichi - rod snake shock service

asai drips songs - nary a year will go by without some release from him, or one of his projects (sherbets, jude). this year in the month of june alone there were two albums released on the same day under his own name - the late night soundtrack chelsea and the curiously strung rod snake shock service, the more rock sibling. bar chords and standard tuning is all he needs, and with only bass and drums to accompany, this basic band brings out the best in his songwriting. speaking, wailing and shouting over his guitar, we are fooled into thinking this song is not like the others in his back catalogue, but really he’s using the same chords over and over. it doesn’t matter - it’s all in the delivery.

recommended songs: fixer, dead rockstar, dark cherry

others:

eunix lee - 9 .18
ami suzuki joins yasutaka nakata - free free
mavis fan & 100% - breakthrough
sherman chung - good girl
puffy - honeycreeper

worst album?

mo’some tonebender - c.o.w. (check out world)

mo’some tonebender produces some wildly varying albums, with varying degrees of success. 2004’s the stories of adventure was subdued album in comparison with later efforts, such as rockin luula, which produced the hit of the same name, and last year’s super nice. they like their rock hard and louder than you can stand. big muff pedals adorn t-shirts, and in the presence of effects like that i can’t help but think the c.o.w. is a reference to mudhoney (my brother the cow). still it’s probably my imagination, as they’ve forgone the overdriven overdrive for electronics and beats that seem stalled from the onset. why does this not surprise me when these songs are all the drummer’s compositions and arrangement, whereas guitarist momokazu hiro used to be the main songwriter. this is why drummers do not write songs part II (part I see genesis for a totally unrelated bag). let’s hope they turn the right corner next time around.

January 20th, 2008 look what i found

thursday was a stinker - 39 degrees - but we caught the train into one of those posh shopping districts. posh ladies who don’t need to work, younger women barking demands into mobile phones. there’s a good music store there though, stocked full of sheet music, instruments and equipment. a girl was trying out the clarinets, which made me feel kinda useless about the case accumulating dust in a crate in the corner of my room.

they keep everything, and probably don’t mark down anything, because this piano score book of times square circa 1980 (the year of my birth, shit) still cost me almost twenty dollars. but it now means i can play i wanna be sedated on the piano, and if i was feeling extra precious, suzi quatro’s rock hard as well. babylon’s burning would sound pretty weird too. but even better, there’s chords and lyrics to the two songs performed in the film in character by nicky and pamela, like your daughter is one:

it’s a pity due to extenuating circumstances that robin johnson didn’t end up with much of an acting career. she’s a complete natural for someone who was scouted sitting outside high school with a cigarette, or maybe she was actually an “exceptionally bright, well-adjusted student, [who] certainly didn’t fit (director alan) moyle’s preconceived notions of what his nicky was going to be”.

i should get the dvd someday - my copy is one i taped digitally from tv and then cut all the ads out. i don’t know what source tapes channel 9 has, but they’re frickin wonky. so i’ll get the benefit of a decent picture and a director’s commentary with the robin johnson. according to this, she sounds more like janeane garofalo these days than that raspy kid. whatever she’s doing now, she’s still alive, living life, and i’m glad this movie exists.

January 16th, 2008 in favour of uncensoring myself

i really do not mind reading people’s unparagraphed ramblings of old - it reminds me how i used to keep a real and true online journal, maybe seven years ago. i don’t mind this slightly sarcastic tone of voice either - in relation to, why did i name my domain “sardonic smile” anyway? the truth is it was after a knockoff hysteric glamour t-shirt i saw in a hong kong magazine in the late 90s, which was pretty much the heyday of hysteric glamour the label, crazy naked lady rocker t-shirts and ridiculous prints. but on the knockoff, h-g was replaced with “sardonic smile”. what an odd turn of phrase - where does it come from? hence it became my handle for everything online, and i figured i might as well make it my domain name when i finally, finally, purchased my own last year.

you know when you add someone on myspace, forget that it sends an email to them notifying them as such, cancel the add, add them on facebook, and then wonder why you’re being ignored? now i just think it’s so funny that i’m such a scatterbrain, probably interpreted by that person as insane. who needs friends anyway, bah humbug?

i was trying to photocopy another fifteen zines to tide me over for the time being, but then i realised i had photocopied one of the pages upside down and completely forgotten to copy another, so i’m still trying to get to my local officeworks somehow between the heat and work. ten for sticky hopefully (i’m going to melbourne in a couple of weeks for a library conference, and i could actually take them in person!), and the rest to orders. sorry if you’re waiting!

i am currently writing a song which in lalaland i think would be perfect for chau pakho as an album track, but i do not know what sells records. anyway in lalaland i send him a link to my song and he likes it so much he insists that it gets rearranged for his next album to enhance his rock image, and i get nice royalties and a writing credit with my name written in chinese.